Is Google Fiber Key to Cloud Happiness?

Google Fiber has arrived (in Kansas City). Video: Google

With the interwebs at the center of our lives these days, with so much we count on requiring connectivity, we often fawn over 4G mobile services as a sort of panacea for mobility. But the irony is 4G LTE offers faster speeds than many can get at home.

Google is aiming to change the underlying experience of the internet — and shape the cloud-centered future — with today’s very limited (read: Kansas City, KS and MO-only) launch of Google Fiber.

Verizon’s FIOS, which now tops out at 300Mbps, is fast — but expensive. AT&T’s U-Verse is relatively cheap, but capped at pretty meager speeds (24Mbps tops) compared with FIOS and the true capability of fiber. I live in a newly built area and my house is so close to the box that AT&T actually ran fiber to the home, or FTTH — a rarity, as they usually run xDSL for the last bit to the house — but the speed is pokier for me than I used to get with Comcast. With Gigabit Ethernet in most rooms in my house, I feel a little let down.

“Google Fiber is 100 times faster than today’s average broadband. No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting. Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the Web,” Google wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

After months of mystery, Kansas City residents learned today that the first high-speed citywide network built by Google will bring them not just super-fast Internet but full-featured cable-style TV service.

Google said in a live announcement Thursday morning that the neighborhoods that rally the most interest will be the first to get hooked up to Google’s fiber-optic lines, which the company says will offer 1 gigabit-per-second downloads and uploads—far faster (Google says 100 times) than the typical broadband connections now in most U.S. homes.

The high speed means Google can compete directly with cable and satellite TV companies. For $120 per month for both TV and internet, residents will get a set-top box that Google says will deliver hundreds of HD channels and tens of thousands of on-demand movies and shows. The service even comes with Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which will serve as the set-top box’s remote.

An interesting angle raised in the Wired Business report is criticism of Google as an “overbuilder”:

By laying its own fiber, Google in Kansas City has become what’s known as an “overbuilder,” because they’ve installed their own wires over existing cable and telecom infrastructure. Leichtman says overbuilding is a notoriously tricky business that Google has no good financial reason to enter on a wide scale.

“The chance of them making any serious advancement into the industry are minimal at best,” he says. “The faster the Internet, the better for Google. But they don’t need to be the ones who own the faster Internet.”

And let’s not forget the ad opportunities. Wohlsen cites Karl Bode, a reporter for DSLreports.com, who writes: “Like the 1 Gbps fiber offering, Google’s interest is in smaller-scale deployments aimed at testing next generation ad technologies—while collecting the kind of real-world end user congestion and performance data ISPs work very hard to keep private.”

OK, so time will tell if even Kansas Citians want this next-generation internet. But this online junkie champions anyone who can step up to the challenge of my modern Gigabit-networked home. There is a business argument that 4G wireless could deliver fast internet to homes, and more effectively in areas with small populations. But with my next personal computer purchase likely to be a Chromebook, I think Google Fiber would help me sleep better at night.

If this injects some high-speed competition into the market, great. U-Verse, tear down this wall.